Curtain call: A longtime Columbia movie theater has closed its doors
A long-running Columbia discount movie theater has gone dark.
The Spotlight Cinemas theater at 527 St. Andrews Road has closed, according to a note on the cinema’s website.
“Spotlight Cinemas St. Andrews is closed,” the note read on Friday. “Please visit our Capital 8 location. We would like to thank the many customers over the past 8.5 years for your patronage. We will miss you all.”
When a reporter from The State briefly went by the St. Andrews Road theater on Thursday afternoon, the roadside marquee for the cinema simply said “closed.”
The theater at 527 St. Andrews Road was initially opened four decades ago, according to the movie theater history site Cinema Treasures. Spotlight Cinemas was the most recent of its owners.
The St. Andrews theater was a second-run cinema, meaning it showed slightly older films for discount ticket prices. Most recently, tickets to all shows had been $3 each. On the weekend of Nov. 17 — the last weekend for which showtimes for the theater were listed on its Facebook page — the moviehouse was showing “Barbie,” “The Blue Beetle,” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem,” among others.
Spotlight Cinemas also operates the Capital 8 theater at 201 Columbia Mall Blvd., near Two Notch Road. That first-run cinema remains open, and for the weekend of Dec. 8 was showing recently released hits such as “Renaissance: A Film By Beyonce,” “Trolls Band Together” and Disney’s “Wish,” among other offerings.
This story was originally published December 8, 2023 at 10:19 AM.
